Glimpses of the Wonderful by Anne Thwaite, Faber and Faber, 拢25, ISBN 0571193285 Reviewed by Simon Ings
WHY do we study the natural world? Today, we might answer: to uncover life鈥檚 underlying principles. In the mid-19th century, those underlying principles were thought to be already established: life was a Creation of God鈥檚.
Ann Thwaite, a literary biographer best known for her lives of Edmund Gosse and A. A. Milne, forays into the history of science with this life of Edmund Gosse鈥檚 father, the naturalist Philip Henry Gosse.
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Thwaite shows that Gosse鈥檚 believed that 鈥渢he gratification of scientific curiosity is worse than useless if we ignore God鈥�. After all, what is science for, if not veneration? What Gosse never could do was abandon his belief in the revealed Word and take up the un-anthropomorphic 鈥渟earch for underlying principles鈥� which would become the defining feature of modern science.
A self-styled Puritan who famously called Christmas pudding 鈥渢he devil鈥檚 sweetmeat鈥�, Gosse was also the finest naturalist of his age. He enjoyed a lifelong, friendly correspondence with Charles Darwin, and popularised the science of his day with rigour and intelligence. For most of us, though, Gosse is best known through his son鈥檚 memoir Father and Son 鈥� a poignant account of Edmund鈥檚 father鈥檚 鈥渟trange severities and eccentric prohibitions鈥�, to which Thwaite provides a robust response.
Dogmatic belief shields us from the inevitability of death. Gosse, born into a millennial age, believed that Christ would return before he died. He spent the last hours of his life in a state of heart-rending and terrible dejection. Who can say they do not share Gosse鈥檚 terrible fear of death? His unenviable distinction was to hold fast to conventional comforts in a revolutionary age.
Thwaite weaves together Gosse鈥檚 professional studies and personal convictions, not into some dead synthesis, but into a story of a man caught in the toils of the scientific establishment as it re-geared itself for the modern age. Omphalos, Gosse鈥檚 great 鈥� and greatly lampooned 鈥� attempt to marry creationist dogma with the evolutionary record, is the work by which he is best known. It is a measure of Thwaite鈥檚 intellectual grasp that we understand how well considered that book really is, and at the same time how unworthy of him. Better that we remember Gosse as a friend remembered him: a figure to embody all the contradictions of his day, 鈥減lunging into a pool in full sacerdotal black, after a sea anemone鈥�.